A House in the Sun

A House in the Sun
Author: Daniel A. Barber
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2016
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 0199394016

A House in the Sun describes a number of experiments in solar house heating in the 1940s and 1950s. It shows how resource limitations were seen as an opportunity for design to attain new relevance for social and cultural transformations.

Architecture

Architecture
Author: Barnabas Calder
Publisher: Penguin UK
Total Pages: 355
Release: 2021-07-01
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 014197821X

A groundbreaking history of architecture told through the relationship between buildings and energy The story of architecture is the story of humanity. The buildings we live in, from the humblest pre-historic huts to today's skyscrapers, reveal our priorities and ambitions, our family structures and power structures. And to an extent that hasn't been explored until now, architecture has been shaped in every era by our access to energy, from fire to farming to fossil fuels. In this ground-breaking history of world architecture, Barnabas Calder takes us on a dazzling tour of some of the most astonishing buildings of the past fifteen thousand years, from Uruk, via Ancient Rome and Victorian Liverpool, to China's booming megacities. He reveals how every building - from the Parthenon to the Great Mosque of Damascus to a typical Georgian house - was influenced by the energy available to its architects, and why this matters. Today architecture consumes so much energy that 40% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions come from the construction and running of buildings. If we are to avoid catastrophic climate change then now, more than ever, we need beautiful but also intelligent buildings, and to retrofit - not demolish - those that remain. Both a celebration of human ingenuity and a passionate call for greater sustainability, this is a history of architecture for our times.

Modern Architecture and Climate

Modern Architecture and Climate
Author: Daniel A. Barber
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2020-07-07
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 0691170037

How climate influenced the design strategies of modernist architects Modern Architecture and Climate explores how leading architects of the twentieth century incorporated climate-mediating strategies into their designs, and shows how regional approaches to climate adaptability were essential to the development of modern architecture. Focusing on the period surrounding World War II—before fossil-fuel powered air-conditioning became widely available—Daniel Barber brings to light a vibrant and dynamic architectural discussion involving design, materials, and shading systems as means of interior climate control. He looks at projects by well-known architects such as Richard Neutra, Le Corbusier, Lúcio Costa, Mies van der Rohe, and Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, and the work of climate-focused architects such as MMM Roberto, Olgyay and Olgyay, and Cliff May. Drawing on the editorial projects of James Marston Fitch, Elizabeth Gordon, and others, he demonstrates how images and diagrams produced by architects helped conceptualize climate knowledge, alongside the work of meteorologists, physicists, engineers, and social scientists. Barber describes how this novel type of environmental media catalyzed new ways of thinking about climate and architectural design. Extensively illustrated with archival material, Modern Architecture and Climate provides global perspectives on modern architecture and its evolving relationship with a changing climate, showcasing designs from Latin America, Europe, the United States, the Middle East, and Africa. This timely and important book reconciles the cultural dynamism of architecture with the material realities of ever-increasing carbon emissions from the mechanical cooling systems of buildings, and offers a historical foundation for today’s zero-carbon design.

Modern Architecture

Modern Architecture
Author: Alan Colquhoun
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2002-04-25
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 0191592641

This new account of international modernism explores the complex motivations behind this revolutionary movement and assesses its triumphs and failures. The work of the main architects of the movement such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Adolf Loos, Le Corbusier, and Mies van der Rohe is re-examined shedding new light on their roles as acknowledged masters. Alan Colquhoun explores the evolution of the movement fron Art Nouveau in the 1890s to the megastructures of the 1960s, revealing the often contradictory demands of form, function, social engagement, modernity and tradition.

The Recovery of Natural Environments in Architecture

The Recovery of Natural Environments in Architecture
Author: C. Alan Short
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 405
Release: 2017-01-20
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1317658698

The Recovery of Natural Environments in Architecture challenges the modern practice of sealing up and mechanically cooling public scaled buildings in whichever climate and environment they are located. This book unravels the extremely complex history of understanding and perception of air, bad air, miasmas, airborne pathogens, beneficial thermal conditions, ideal climates and climate determinism. It uncovers inventive and entirely viable attempts to design large buildings, hospitals, theatres and academic buildings through the 19th and early 20th centuries, which use the configuration of the building itself and a shrewd understanding of the natural physics of airflow and fluid dynamics to make good, comfortable interior spaces. In exhuming these ideas and reinforcing them with contemporary scientific insight, the book proposes a recovery of the lost art and science of making naturally conditioned buildings.

Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment

Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment
Author: Reyner Banham
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 326
Release: 1984-12-15
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9780226036984

Reyner Banham was a pioneer in arguing that technology, human needs, and environmental concerns must be considered an integral part of architecture. No historian before him had so systematically explored the impact of environmental engineering on the design of buildings and on the minds of architects. In this revision of his classic work, Banham has added considerable new material on the use of energy, particularly solar energy, in human environments. Included in the new material are discussions of Indian pueblos and solar architecture, the Centre Pompidou and other high-tech buildings, and the environmental wisdom of many current architectural vernaculars.

Air-Conditioning in Modern American Architecture, 1890–1970

Air-Conditioning in Modern American Architecture, 1890–1970
Author: Joseph M. Siry
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 764
Release: 2021-03-25
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 0271089008

Air-Conditioning in Modern American Architecture, 1890–1970, documents how architects made environmental technologies into resources that helped shape their spatial and formal aesthetic. In doing so, it sheds important new light on the ways in which mechanical engineering has been assimilated into the culture of architecture as one facet of its broader modernist project. Tracing the development and architectural integration of air-conditioning from its origins in the late nineteenth century to the advent of the environmental movement in the early 1970s, Joseph M. Siry shows how the incorporation of mechanical systems into modernism’s discourse of functionality profoundly shaped the work of some of the movement’s leading architects, such as Dankmar Adler, Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Gordon Bunshaft, and Louis Kahn. For them, the modernist ideal of functionality was incompletely realized if it did not wholly assimilate heating, cooling, ventilating, and artificial lighting. Bridging the history of technology and the history of architecture, Siry discusses air-conditioning’s technical and social history and provides case studies of buildings by the master architects who brought this technology into the conceptual and formal project of modernism. A monumental work by a renowned expert in American modernist architecture, this book asks us to see canonical modernist buildings through a mechanical engineering–oriented lens. It will be especially valuable to scholars and students of architecture, modernism, the history of technology, and American history.

Architecture in a Climate of Change

Architecture in a Climate of Change
Author: Peter F Smith
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 295
Release: 2006-08-11
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1136428534

Revised to incorporate and reflect changes and advances since it was first published the new edition of Architecture in a Climate of Change provides the latest basic principals of sustainability and the future of sustainable technology. Including new material on wind generation, domestic water conservation, solar thermal electricity as well as international case studies Architecture in a Climate of Change encourages readers to consider new approaches to building making minimum demand on fossil based energy.

Design Studio Vol. 1: Everything Needs to Change

Design Studio Vol. 1: Everything Needs to Change
Author: Sofie Pelsmakers
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 275
Release: 2021-03-31
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1000375439

Want to keep up with emerging design thinking and issues worldwide? Design Studio is a new thematic series that distils the most topical work and ideas from schools and practices globally. The first volume launches with a statement: Everything Needs to Change. Exploring architecture and the climate emergency, editors Sofie Pelsmakers (author of Environmental Design Sourcebook) and Nick Newman (climate activist and Director at Studio Bark), are channelling the message of Greta Thunberg to inspire, enthuse and inform the next generation of architects. Featuring articles, building profiles and case studies from a range of leading voices, it explores solutions to climatic, environmental and social challenges. It urges readers to radically rethink what it means to be an architect in an era of climate crisis, and what the role of the architect is or can be. Discover how using local materials, working with nature, radical design processes, transformative learning and activism can help us find hope in the burning world. Together, we can force change for a more sustainable and equitable tomorrow. This first volume is produced in four unique fluorescent colours – green, red, yellow and purple – to be your own poster for change.